19. GOODBYE, STEVEN

GOODBYE, STEVEN

A perky waiter set a glass of white wine on the linen tablecloth in front of me. "Your order will be right out," he said, looking from me to Steven, before buzzing across the patio to another table. We hadn't been to that restaurant together for years, but at one time, a lifetime ago, it had been our favorite weekend brunch place. My throat tightened. I reached for my glass of wine and drank half of it in two gulps before setting it back down on the white tablecloth with a muffled clunk.

Steven pursed his lips together and ran his fingers over the salt and pepper stubble on his left cheek.

"Are you okay?" he asked, his voice a little higher than usual.

I nodded, inhaling so deeply that my chest swelled, popping the top button of my black cashmere cardigan. I rolled my eyes in a self-deprecating way; look at me; I'm an idiot, in hopes that I'd beat Steven to the punch. Over the years, he'd criticized me so much and made so many comments on my imperfect clothes or my chaotic way of being that I had a hard time being perceived by him at all. My fingers worked to push the pearl button back into its slot.

"Wow, this is really hard," I chuckled nervously. The papers finalizing our divorce had arrived, and we'd agreed to sit down and talk about what to do moving forward, how to co-parent and co-exist, together but separate, until the girls were grown and beyond.

"We have a lot to talk about, and it feels a little overwhelming," I admitted. We'd already sorted out the big things in mediation and basically just agreed to split assets, finances, all of it, evenly. We agreed on a sixty-forty split for custody because his job didn't allow him to be there half of the time. Easy peasy. But the smaller things, like how to best communicate, or how to tell the kids, we had yet to discuss. In my naivety, life after divorce could be easy, we both just needed to accept that it was the best thing to do, make a plan, and execute that plan to raise our kids as two platonic friends.

"I just hope we can find a way to be friends." I said earnestly, "We clearly aren't meant for marriage, but we've shared a lot for a long time. We share children. And at one time, I think we were in love. We should try to remember that, right?"

Steven squeezed his eyes shut and opened them wide like he was double-checking to make sure the world was real. He cleared his throat, opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it. He confused me.

The perky waiter once again bounced up to our table. "Here you go. Salad for youuuu!" He placed a fennel and orange salad in front of Steven, who glared at him for the interruption, "and the carrot ginger soup for you!" He set the small ceramic bowl in front of me. "Enjoy!" he sang, and skipped off, the whole restaurant his personal runway. I had no idea where the positivity or energy came from, but I wanted it.

"I know it's too late," Steven said carefully, his eyes big and doelike. He poked at his salad with a fork, "but just for the record, I still love you. I think we could still make it work. Honestly, it started as jealousy; I felt neglected after you had the girls, and I think I became resentful. I know I can do better–."

"–Steven. No." I shook my head, "that's not why we are here."

He dipped his chin once, begrudgingly accepting the rejection of his last ditch effort, then put a finger in the air, signaling the waiter to bring him a glass of wine.

"I love you, too." I admitted.

Should I be totally honest or keep it amicable? It wouldn't do anyone any favors to hold back but fuck I didn't want to say it but I needed to.

"I'm just," I searched for the words, "I'm just not in love with you anymore, Steven. You haven't been good to me. You had a million chances to do better, and you didn't. It's too late for us to fix that; I can't get past it; I've spent a billion hours in therapy trying. But I don't think it's too late for us to build a friendship."

He stared into his lap, sniffling quietly, and when he looked up, his eyes were glossy and red.

"Okay," he whispered.

I forced a smile, lips tight and awkward as I battled internally. See, I cared about Steven, so I wanted him to be okay. And I was so sick of his shit that I wanted to slap him. Because after everything , I had to sit across from him while he cried or performed crying when all he had to do was care enough to do better for all those years.

The waiter brought wine, and we sat quietly for a while, nursing our wounds and sipping from our glasses. Steven ate a few bites of his salad, I swirled my soup, and the silverware clanked, a choir of church bells within the silence of our miserable little world.

A toddler at a nearby table yelled, "Oh shit, man!" His horrified parents turned crimson and frantically scanned the perimeter to see if anyone else noticed. Steven and I looked at each other and lost it, our laughs bouncing off of the walls, carrying our collective joy and sorrow with them, until the tension dissolved within me, and I pictured it traveling out of my body like a black cloud, gathering in my chest and billowing out of my mouth like a smokestack. Like a dragon.

"Oh damn," I dabbed at my eyes, "I needed that." I chuckled. "Remember Ria's swearing phase?"

Steven cleared his throat.

"Mmhm. Who knew a preschooler could drop the F-bomb with so much conviction."

"And in the right context, too."

He nodded, "Yep."

It felt good to laugh together again. It had been years . A weight lifted off of us–and there we were, under all the muck, two old friends reminiscing about our beautiful children together.

And just like that, we slid into the semantics of the divorce, agreeing that he should stay in the mother-in-law apartment above the studio in the backyard since he traveled so much. It didn't make sense for him to pay rent, which would only take away from the girls' college funds.

It was better, immediately better. The anger I'd been carrying around diminished, because we were treating each other with respect for the first time in a long time. He couldn't afford to take me for granted, and I didn't feel like I was walking on eggshells.

We grieved the relationship over the main course–scallops for him, halibut for me–and we both cried, laughed, mapped out our lives, apologized, and after a glass of dessert wine, walked back to our cars happier than we'd been since the girls were born. I had no doubt that many battles lay ahead of us. But damn , I thought, I should have done this a long time ago.

Back at the house, we sat the girls down in the backyard next to the playground we'd all built together and told them that we had decided to raise them together as friends, instead of as married folks. Victoria cried and ran to her room, then Olivia panicked and followed. We spent the rest of the evening outlining what life would look like moving forward, ensuring them that we would love them exactly the same, forever. Seeing the girls upset made me wonder, more than once, if I'd made a huge mistake. But I reminded myself of what my therapist had said about how "everyone's hard comes for them at some point in their lives, and divorce would be their hard. I could love them through hard, but I couldn't prevent hard from happening." It became a sort of mantra. That and "don't model bad love for the sake of good parenting," among a dozen others. When I got really desperate, I just chanted, "What would Dolly do?" Because Dolly Parton, patron saint, y'all. Our lives were changing and it terrified me, I'd bit my nails down to the quick and had gnawed my lip raw, but for the first time in years, I felt hope, too, that I'd get to wake up one day not too far off, and feel like myself again.